Technology and the Global South: A US strategy for competitiveness

September 28, 2026 • 12:30 pm ET Conrad Tucker and Peter Engelke Bottom lines up front To compete with the United States, China is prioritizing the expansion of its high-tech industries by strategically engaging markets in the Global South.The United States is losing influence across the world due to its inefficient approaches to partnerships and China’s growth in tech-based trade.Though the Global South may remain non-aligned, increased trade and exchange with it is in the core interest of the US. Executive summary The United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are engaged in a strategic competition for scientific and technological leadership. Since World War II, the United States has dominated the development of cutting-edge technology. But Beijing has made clear its ambition to surpass this scientific achievement and establish itself as the future global leader. To maintain advantage in breakthrough technologies and expanding preeminence in commercial markets, this strategy paper argues that the United States must strengthen its tech-centric engagement with countries across the Global South. Three goals should guide US strategy moving forward. The first is to outcompete China in tech-based exchange (trade and investment) throughout the Global South. The second is to coordinate with partners, particularly those in the Global South, to more effectively compete with China. The third is to leverage that coordination to preserve cooperation on trade and scientific exchanges, despite growing geopolitical tensions around both. Achieving these goals require strategy built around six key elements: responding to the development priorities and economic needs of Global South countries; tailoring technology solutions for the Global South for mutual benefits; identifying multipliers that can enhance engagement and impact; strengthening participation in multilateral standards bodies; building trust with Global South partners; and using coercive tools sparingly. The Global South has diverse geographies and political economies. This paper breaks the Global South into the following regions: Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. Each region has different relationships with the United States and China, and these differences are important to keep in mind when shaping US strategy, policies, and investments. This strategy assumes that the United States will need to increase resources to meet China’s growing presence, and that most countries in the Global South will prefer to remain non-aligned amid US-China competition. As such, the United States should retain its advantage relative to China as a trusted partner in providing innovative tech goods and services and earn that trust through sustained engagement through the following recommendations to policymakers: Leverage diaspora networks in the United States to build stronger relationships with Global South technology sectors. Invest in educational and technical partnerships in the Global South to provide an alternative to China’s growing soft power influence. Improve situational awareness of how US and PRC strategies, investments, and technologies are affecting Global South countries in real time on the ground. Identify like-minded partners to scale investment and coordinate resources in the Global South. Modernize and streamline US government overseas capabilities to facilitate more coordinated support for US tech engagement in the Global South. Limit the overuse of coercive tools to avoid alienating partners in the Global South and thereby benefiting China’s standing. Strategic context The United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are engaged in a decades-long strategic competition for advantage in scientific and technological development. This competition has two dimensions: for first-mover advantage in breakthrough technologies with dual-use application (civilian and military applications), and for preeminence in commercial technology markets around the world. This paper argues that if the United States is to outcompete China along both dimensions globally, it must improve its engagement with countries across the Global South as a trusted partner in providing tech-based good and services. Doing so would serve its economic interests, including the gains to be had from more robust trade and investment in technology (goods and services). Doing so also would serve its geopolitical interests, which include positive diplomatic outcomes across a wide range of categories: for example, establishment of technical standards around information and communications technologies (ICT, including 5G and 6G), artificial intelligence (AI), and others, or securing access to critical minerals and other necessary inputs to advanced technologies of all kinds. The PRC prioritizes technology as the leading edge of its competition with the United States. It intends to surpass the United States as the world’s foremost nation in scientific achievement and technological development. (According to some metrics, such as the number of patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty as administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, China already has surpassed the United States.) In part because China has prioritized tech-centric industries including AI, telecommunications, renewable energy technologies, robotics, and more, it has become increasingly reliant on foreign markets to absorb its overproduction in manufactured goods, including tech-suffused goods such as electric vehicles (EVs). This strategy is part of a broader playbook that extends across multiple industries and sectors: produce at scale using state subsidies and expand into overseas markets utilizing a price advantage to capture foreign market share. The data support as much: China’s tech exports have grown over the last two decades from $400 billion in 2004 to $1.5 trillion in 2023. Although there now is pushback against a rising tide of Chinese exports, for example within the European Union, the PRC has several advantages over the United States and its allies and partners when it comes to its position within the global trading system, one of which is its long-standing emphasis on building inroads with emerging economies in the Global South.1While the term “Global South” is contested because of its diffuse geographic boundaries and conceptual challenges, the term remains useful shorthand for describing the largest bloc of (mostly) non-aligned countries and increasingly important economies in the world. See Zachariah Mampilly, “What ‘the Global South’ Really Means,” Foreign Affairs, April 1, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/what-global-south-really-means. Not only are China’s fastest growing trade partners countries in the Global South, but its trade with such countries also now far outstrips that with the United States and Europe. According to the consultancy S&P Global, as of 2024 China “sells over 50% more to the Global South ($1.6 trillion) than to the US and Western Europe combined ($1 trillion).” Chinese investment in the Global South spans not just the full “tech stack,” including tech infrastructure, devices, and applications as well as governance (e.g., laws governing tech usage) and the cultural and educational institutions that support a country’s tech ecosystem, but other tech-sector enablers such as ports, roads, and energy infrastructure. China’s expansive engagement induces firms and governments in Global South countries to adopt its firms’ technologies, as well as China’s preferred governance models, over Western counterparts, in part owing to its willingness to underwrite its firms through subsidies and other forms of state support. Because China’s growth in trade in the Global South, including tech-based trade, has been so robust, the United States has been losing ground to the PRC across this large swathe of the world. A 2023 World Bank analysis showed that in 2000, China was the number one goods trading partner for nine countries around the world. By 2020, that figure had grown to seventy-nine countries, a nearly ninefold increase over just two decades. This growth came at the expense of the United States, which enjoyed first place status for fifty-one countries in 2000 but just thirty-three countries in 2020, thirty of which were in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In aggregate, the Global South’s share of world gross domestic product (GDP) has been rising rapidly for decades—per the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), from 30 percent of global GDP in 2007 to 42 percent in 2024. Moreover, countries in the Global South have been diversifying what they export and import and with whom they trade. “A more diversified or weblike pattern of global trade has replaced the older hub-and-spoke flows,” UNCTAD notes, observing that this pattern includes rising “South-South” trade occurring completely outside the purview of the United States and other countries in the so-called Global North.2UN Conference on Trade and Development, Trade and Development Report 2025: Chapter 4, 124, https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tdr2025ch4_en.pdf. Burgeoning markets across the Global South beckon in part because of more youthful demography found in parts (but not all) of its various regions. Gains from expanding trade with the Global South intersect with geostrategic and geoeconomic considerations, for example access to a steady supply of critical minerals and energy resources. As is well known, many critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt are integral to advanced technology content and manufacturing. For the United States, the strategic question involves the degree to which it intends to compete with China across the entire Global South. This paper argues that it is in the core interest of the United States to do so, for numerous reasons. Those reasons include increased trade and exchange with this dynamic and increasingly prosperous swathe of the world as well as the diplomatic and geopolitical gains that would accompany a strategy such as the one outlined here. Project overview and definitions This strategy paper is the result of a three-year project focused on US-China tech competition in the Global South. The project’s scope was defined in an October 2024 strategic insights memo which established a framework for understanding this competition and the stakes involved. In the project’s first year, the Atlantic Council conducted expert interviews, convened a private workshop, and produced a landscape assessment of US-China technology competition in the Global South, using AI as a case study. The project’s second year shifted toward incorporating greater Global South perspectives through two workshops—one focused on Africa and another on Latin America. Both workshops were designed to gather perspectives directly from regional stakeholders. All workshops were conducted under the Chatham House Rule to facilitate candid conversations. The authors then consolidated insights from the workshops, expert interviews, and desk research to generate the insights contained in this strategy paper. This section also defines and delimits several terms used in this paper. Global South There are numerous views on what the Global South is (or is not). The term is decades old, dating to at least 1969, when it was first coined, and to 1980 when a first widely recognized map depicting a dividing line—the so-called Brandt Line—between a global north and a global south was created.3In 1969, the American anti-Vietnam War activist Carl Oglesby coined the phrase “Global South” to describe how wealthy northern countries dominated those in the south. In 1980, a committee led by the former West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, published a map featuring what became known as the Brandt Line, a dividing line between a wealthier north and a poorer south. See “What Does the Rise of the Global South Mean for the World?,” Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, October 24, 2024, https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/gia/article/what-does-the-rise-of-the-global-south-mean-for-the-world. Since then, the term (Global South) has had different meanings rooted in geography, development status, or politics and ideology. For example, the Global South has been defined in simple north-south geographic terms, as it was with the Brandt Line in 1980. Alternatively, the term also has been used to describe the world’s developing countries, akin to the phrase “Third World” that was used during the Cold War, many of which (but not all) lie in the southern hemisphere. The term also has been used to describe the group of dispossessed countries that are interested in remaking the global system through the formation of alternative institutions, for instance the Group of 77 (G77) or the BRICS, and thereby challenging the established order largely created and led by Western countries. Regardless of which approach is used, an obvious problem concerns which countries are in and out of the category, Global South. There is no easy answer to this question. Like many other terms that have been used as shorthand to describe large and complex geographic regions, there are numerous cases that are hard to categorize. The BRICS case and its linkage to the Global South is one of the best examples. Often viewed as an institution comprised of countries within the Global South—and thus perceived as an advocate for the Global South against the Global North—three of the five original countries in the grouping (China, Russia, and India) are nuclear powers, two (China and Russia) have permanent seats on the United Nations’ Security Council, two (China and India) have among the most advanced tech-innovation ecosystems in the world, and one (China) is a peer competitor to the United States in nearly every respect. To make things even more complicated, three of the four (China, Russia, and India) lie entirely in the northern hemisphere, while Russia views itself as both a European and an Asian nation. The bottom line is whether countries with such geopolitical and economic power, and with such geography, can rightly be said to belong to a dispossessed Global South. Their cases become even more difficult given their self-perceptions. One can make a strong case that both India and China deserved to be included in a dispossessed, post-colonial global south during the first decades after World War II, given their relatively low development levels (at the time), self-identification as Cold War outsiders, and leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) beginning with the Bandung conference of 1955. In more recent decades, however, their categorization becomes a more difficult proposition, especially for an increasingly wealthy and powerful China that has risen to challenge the United States in every respect. Moreover, China did not embrace the term (Global South) until 2023, when it was first uttered publicly by senior Chinese state officials. Since then, China has defined itself as a champion of the Global South against a more powerful Global North. “China is naturally a member of the Global South,” stated Foreign Minister Wang Yi in 2025, “because we have fought colonialism and hegemonism together in history and we are committed to the common goal of development and revitalization.” This is a controversial statement within the Global South itself, for China’s status as the bloc’s leader is contested by other BRICS states, not least by India. Despite differences on how to define the Global South—and concerns that the term is inappropriate or outdated—we maintain that it remains useful to describe an enormous geographic arena within which China and the United States compete for influence, and as shorthand for the world’s largest bloc of countries that are increasingly important actors in their own right: economically, demographically, diplomatically, and geopolitically. There are few alternative terms to describe this broad swathe of the world. This paper defines the phrase “Global South” to mean most of the world’s countries that lie outside the historic core of the global economy (largely but not exclusively members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD). Admittedly, this is a broad canvas with poorly defined edges and disputable cases. Despite numerous qualifications about the diversity of countries that are in the Global South (including higher-income countries, countries that are geographically in the northern hemisphere, and countries that are middle or even major powers in geopolitical terms), for this paper the main insight remains that this great swathe of the world is increasingly populous, prosperous, and powerful, hence of strategic interest to the United States and China. Technology stack The term “technology stack” refers to the interconnected hardware and software that together constitute a nation’s technology assets. The word “stack” is used because some elements, like physical infrastructure such as cables and satellites, are necessary for the base, upon which others such as devices (e.g., laptop computers, smartphones) and, ultimately, software-based applications stand. Some analysts place a governance layer, which refers to legal and regulatory frameworks governing technology use within a country, at the top of the stack.4For an example of a five-element technology stack, see Sharinee L. Jagtiani, “Risky Configuration: China’s Footprint in Germany’s Technology Stack,” German Marshall Fund, September 16, 2025, 10–12, https://www.gmfus.org/news/risky-configuration-chinas-footprint-germanys-technology-stack. In the context of AI as an example, a technology stack could include energy and connectivity infrastructure, GPU servers for computation, data centers for storage, fiber-optic infrastructure used to pass information from one medium to another, weather satellites that are used to capture data, AI models that train on available data and are used to conduct analyses and contribute to decision-making, and a country’s AI governance statutes and regulations, if any. A recent policy brief by the Atlantic Council argued that China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR, “the digital economy pillar of the Belt and Road Initiative”) has created what amounts to a “Chinese tech stack,” wherein its firms, working in close coordination with Chinese banks and other intermediaries, “bundle” their offerings across the tech stack from the infrastructure layer through applications to software and finally governance frameworks. “Adoption at one layer,” the brief’s authors argue, “increases incentives to adopt adjacent layers for interoperability and operational continuity, raising switching costs and creating technical and institutional lock-in” to China’s benefit. (The DSR is by no means the only pathway for China to extend its influence along the tech stack; in July 2026, for example, it launched the World AI Cooperation Organization, along with twenty-nine founding countries, mostly from the Global South.) Yet hardware and software do not have to come from the same supplier and country, a situation that creates challenges, ranging from interoperability across systems to navigating complex geopolitics related to the sensitivities surrounding some forms of hardware and software. A famous geopolitically driven example involves the Chinese telecom firm Huawei, which for years has been unable to sell devices within the US market on national security grounds; that ban may soon extend to the sale of any device in the US market that includes key component parts made by Huawei. Similarly, the US government’s Federal Communications Commission recently banned the importation of “foreign-produced advanced robotic devices” weighing over two kilograms, a decision widely interpreted as targeting Chinese robotics companies. Competition The term “competition” is used in this paper to refer to a spectrum of activities ranging from economic competition, characterized by trade and exchange largely between private actors, to geopolitical competition, characterized by strategic alignment between states. For both the United States and China, competing successfully means increasing the volume and profitability of commercial engagement within Global South markets and/or improving geopolitical alignment—including diplomatic alignment on strategic objectives as well as military cooperation—with Global South states. Although these two forms of competition overlap, they are not identical and are not treated as such in this paper. When China or the United States is predominant in a foreign country’s tech-based trade, it does not automatically mean that either state enjoys geopolitical leverage over that country. This is because countries in the Global South can and do acquire the bulk of their technologies from one or the other major power yet often hedge their bets in diplomatic and geopolitical contexts. Shanghai is a global center for science and technology, business, finance, and research. UNSPLASH/Ralf Leineweber. Goals In 2023, the Atlantic Council released a strategy for US-China tech competition at the global level, which argued that US policymakers should adopt three overarching goals vis-à-vis the nation’s global competition with China: first, to preserve America’s leading position in scientific achievement and technological development; second, to harmonize strategy and policy with allies and partners, while gaining favor with nonaligned states, in pursuit of the first goal; and third, to retain cooperation around trade and scientific exploration, including with China, despite increasing tensions and contestation over technological development. Although the shift from the Biden administration to the Trump administration has brought about many changes in US foreign policy objectives, we assert that when it comes to tech-based competition with China, the goals articulated in the 2023 strategy remain evergreen. Adjusted for application to tech competition in the Global South, these three goals can be articulated as follows: Outcompete China in tech-based exchange (trade and investment) throughout the Global South. One of the core premises of this strategy paper is that the United States is behind China in many parts of the Global South in both trade and diplomatic engagement. As stated in the Strategic context section, China has made economic and diplomatic outreach to the Global South a priority much more so than has the United States. The reason why this goal needs to be stated as a goal—as opposed to being assumed in this paper—is precisely because we believe that the United States needs to explicitly articulate this goal as a priority. Failing to do so will mean that the United States will fall further behind in tech-infused trade, exchange, investment, and cooperation. Logically, therefore, grasping the opportunity to outcompete China is in the best interests of the United States. Work alongside partners, including within the Global South, to compete with China. States across the Global South not only are emerging global powers but are also diplomatically and economically active players within the Global South itself. The list of such important “South-South” players is a long one. It includes China and India as well as middle powers ranging from Morocco to Indonesia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Chile, Nigeria, Colombia, and a great many others. As an example, in recent years several Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, prominently including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, collectively have invested more than one hundred billion dollars in sub-Saharan Africa to diversify their own economies, acquire diplomatic influence abroad, and gain access to critical minerals and other natural resources that the GCC states see as critical for transitioning away from oil and natural gas.5As is the case with other states including China, there are arguments to be made on both sides as to whether the GCC states should be included in the Global South, given their wealth and power. Although we include them in the Global South for the purposes of this paper, at the same time we acknowledge that these states possess significant power and influence in the Gulf, the wider MENA region, and globally. Hence, they are fitting examples of one of the arguments raised in this paper concerning the rising economic, technological, and even geopolitical power across the Global South. The GCC states see investment opportunities in Africa across a broad range of sectors, including infrastructure, energy, critical minerals, agriculture, and others. African states, for their parts, have seized upon shortfalls in Western investment in these sectors by calling for greater investment from other states in the Global South, including the GCC. This aligns with the GCC states’ interests in expanding their influence around the world while also competing in “strategic capital deployment” with one another. Retain open cooperation in trade and scientific and technical exchange. The 2023 Atlantic Council strategy for global US-China tech competition asserted that despite rising tensions within the Sino-American bilateral relationship, the US government should maintain healthy scientific cooperation with China. Unfortunately, the erosion of such cooperation is fully underway. According to Dennis Simon and Caroline S. Wagner, two researchers studying international scientific cooperation, the era we are in now, dubbed scientific nationalism, is “defined by the securitization of research, the framing of technological development as a zero-sum competition, and the recalibration of partnerships through a lens of strategic vulnerability.” The biggest drivers of this change are China and the United States, until recently the world’s largest scientific collaborators. While these two major powers are decoupling their scientific enterprises, China is investing in greater scientific and technical exchange in the Global South. In a separate article, Wagner and Simon contend that China has “negotiated and signed scientific and technological cooperation agreements with dozens of middle- and lower-income countries” for building political ties, access to scientific and technical knowledge, and as precursor to establishing formal intergovernmental relationships. Major elements of the strategy We identify five key elements to guide a strategy to outcompete China across the entire Global South (in section VI, this paper disaggregates the Global South by region). Consistently signal strong interest in development priorities and economic needs of countries in the Global South Signaling strong interest in the development priorities and economic needs of Global South countries is a self-evident pillar of this strategy. However, for whatever set of reasons, US policymakers, and to some extent the US business community, have deprioritized engagement across the entire Global South. China, as this paper asserts, has made the opposite choice. Its patience has paid off. A recent report on US-China competition in the Global South, released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), documents China’s spectacular growth in trade with the Global South since 2000 across a wide range of industries, including defense and key technologies (such as mobile devices, e-commerce, and electric vehicles). China gained across every region within the Global South, defined by ITIF as the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Central Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly all gains came at the expense of the trade share enjoyed by the United States. The ITIF report asserts that China acquired its position through deliberate strategic choices, massive investments, and “non-market driven” industrial policies including “state-backed capital, discriminatory market access, and coerced technology transfer.”6Rodrigo Balbontin, “The Global Trade Battleground: US-China Competition in the Global South,” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, April 6, 2026, 27, https://itif.org/publications/2026/04/06/global-trade-battleground-us-china-competition-in-the-global-south/. China, in other words, is both deliberate in its choices to engage economies across the entire Global South and aggressive in its execution of those choices. The logic of sustained engagement and signaling of interest in the development priorities and needs of Global South countries extends beyond the tech sector to numerous tech-adjacent sectors as well. Perhaps the best and most germane example is in raw materials development, including development of those critical minerals that are inputs to core technologies including in the defense-industrial sector. These minerals and resources are subject to much geopolitical and geoeconomic turbulence. For example, the global supply of helium, used in chip production, has been restricted since the onset of the war in Iran (Qatar supplies a third of the world’s helium, which is found in Qatar’s natural gas at relatively high concentrations). To diversify supply, the United States could assist other countries in expanding their helium exports, for example Tanzania, which is developing natural gas deposits with high helium concentration levels. In the critical minerals sector, China holds a dominant position worldwide, resulting in an unparalleled ability to shape global critical minerals supply chains. Countering China’s position will require that the United States embrace partnerships with countries that want to add value to their critical minerals supply chains via, e.g., processing. Ensure technology solutions are tailored to demand in the Global South One of the problems facing the United States is rooted in the perception—as expressed in private workshops organized by the Atlantic Council as part of the research for this paper—that the US government and its firms do not prioritize countries and markets in different world regions. Workshop participants stated that although consumer-facing US technologies often are superior to their Chinese counterparts, they also are often more expensive and are not positioned and marketed as precisely as Chinese alternatives. The latter point is important, because markets across the Global South require as much nuanced and localized understanding as markets anywhere else. African mobile markets provide apt examples. Safaricom’s M-Pesa came to dominate Kenya’s mobile payment market because its parent company focused on understanding the local conditions that would enable M-Pesa to succeed. “Western tech giants find this challenge difficult to overcome,” a writer for Forbes magazine argued, “as their way of thinking rarely aligns with the nitty-gritty issues that unhinge ideas in these markets.” Chinese firms, in contrast, have done well in this market because they have developed features that appeal to local markets. Perhaps the best example is Transsion Holdings, which has nearly half the African mobile phone market in large part because it has tailored its products for local conditions, including longer battery life for areas with unreliable electricity, camera functions that better capture darker skin tones, and providing dual SIM card ports to enable mixed data plans. There is a difficult policy question here, however. If US companies choose not to compete in markets requiring such granular knowledge owing to higher costs, then policymakers’ options will be constrained by such market-based calculations. Identify multipliers in the Global South to enhance impact To compete with China around the world, the US will need to focus on multipliers (partnerships with foreign governments, firms, and civil society actors), as it is unlikely that the US government will make the resources available to compete on a one-to-one dollar basis with China. (To provide a sense of the resource gap, between 2013 and 2021, China spent $679 billion for infrastructure projects across the Global South, compared with $76 billion in US spending.) The strategy outlined here stresses that the US government should identify partners in the Global South and beyond that can build and enhance US standing, credibility, and competitiveness as they relate to tech-centric competition with China. The United States will need to be selective in where, how, and when to compete to seize opportunities when circumstances are most advantageous. There are numerous possibilities, including strategic investments with governments and firms (i.e., public-private partnerships), soft power investments in educational and training institutions (where value can be demonstrated), and building positive relations with civil society organizations to increase the legitimacy of US investments and institutions. China’s development model has struggled to build enduring relationships extending beyond the state. As noted in a 2025 landscape assessment conducted as part of the three-year series giving rise to this strategy, traditional US allies and partners, including in Europe and East Asia, have been active in developing their own multipliers. As that assessment discusses, an example includes the European Union’s “Global Gateway” program that invests pooled European resources (mobilizing up to €400 billion ($466 billion) in investment by 2027) toward projects in the digital, energy, transport, health, education, and research sectors. Its hundreds of funded projects include those focused on renewable energy, power grids, undersea cables, health technologies, technical education, and dozens of other categories across the world, including the Global South. Another example is the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s funding of a program at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to facilitate innovative tech transfers between Japanese companies and Global South partners. Over 2025 and 2026, Japan has quietly been reaching agreements with governments and multilateral institutions (e.g., Association of Southeast Asian Nations) across the Global South to cooperate on AI development, a strategy that some have interpreted as a way for Japan to begin reducing its reliance on US and Chinese AI technologies. Retain and strengthen presence in multilateral standards bodies The United States should continue to engage in multilateral tech diplomacy, wherein it demonstrates its continued interest in strengthening multilateral standards-setting organizations that validate norms and standards in emerging technologies, including in AI. Doing so serves to counter Chinese influence in these bodies, raise acceptance of US positions including in “standards-setting, spectrum coordination, interoperability, and infrastructure governance,” and thereby strengthen “predictable and open markets for US technology exports.” Conversely, retreating from such a forward-leaning positioning—whether in longstanding organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization, the International Telecommunication Union, and the International Electrotechnical Commission or in tech-specific bodies such as the emerging Global Dialogue on AI Governance at the United Nations—does not serve US interests. Building partnerships across the Global South on this front would serve both economic and geopolitical ends, through increasing the size and significance of US-aligned blocs within multilateral standards bodies. Continue to emphasize trust As expressed in the Atlantic Council workshops that were held as input for this project, the United States appears to enjoy a trust advantage over China when it comes to technological goods and services (although this claim comes with significant caveats including the risk of overgeneralization). Workshop participants expressed discomfort with Chinese technologies including, for instance, concerns about intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, and surveillance data that Chinese companies might relay to their government. Yet they also indicated that the trust equation is more complicated in that there also are trust-related questions involving US tech companies including privacy issues involving the use of consumer-generated data by those companies, for example, even if that use does not tie back to the US government. The United States should strive to retain a trust dividend vis-à-vis China as a key part of its attempt to counterbalance China’s greater resource commitments within the Global South. Diplomatic engagement should reinforce this message. When it comes to AI and other emerging technologies, the United States has done so in the past. “The United States has spent a great deal of effort to build a global governance architecture that promotes the safe, secure, and responsible use of AI,” a November 2024 Atlantic Council essay in this project series claims, “[and has advocated] for a governance model based on security and responsibility at international forums such as the [Group of Seven], the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, and the AI Seoul Summit.” Retaining such an advantage into the future is far from a given if the US government does not demonstrate the sincerity of commitment to engagement with the Global South—per the first pillar of this strategy, discussed above. US policy can work at cross-purposes, for example, when the United States shows a healthy commitment to working with Global South countries on AI or critical minerals but at the same time makes simple communications blunders or, worse, implements policies that signal a disinterest in the Global South, such as when it restricts talented STEM students from studying in the United States. Use coercive tools sparingly In a very small number of cases where the application of coercive tools are warranted, such as for national security and other reasons, the US government should employ targeted tariffs, sanctions, embargos, quotas, diplomatic pressure, and other instruments to inhibit adoption of the Chinese tech stack and increase use of the US stack and those of its allies and partners. A past example was the US government’s campaign to pressure allies and partners to exclude Huawei components from their 5G networks. However, such tools should be used sparingly for two reasons: First, they may be ineffective or even counterproductive should they alienate key potential partners and/or induce Chinese firms and their buyers to find creative ways around US coercive measures; second, they signal—accurately or not—that the US is interested in structuring trade and exchange in its favor using any means necessary, including through coercive instruments. The overuse of such instruments has prompted other countries, including the BRICS nations, to find alternatives to dollar-denominated trade. As Australia’s Lowy Institute asserted in 2023, a “growing pressure for a new global currency [arose] after continued weaponisation of the US dollar in the form of sanctions and trade wars.” A printed circuit board of electronic device connecting electronic components. UNSPLASH/Umberto. Competition within and across regions This section disaggregates the Global South into regions to differentiate among diverse geographies and political economies. Acknowledging that there are several possible regional categorization schemes, we utilize the following regions: Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the Asia-Pacific. Latin America and the Caribbean LAC is a predominately mid-to-high-income region (GDP per capita of $12,200 per year), but with high income inequality (the region is the world’s most unequal) and a large informal economy (more than half of all workers in LAC are informally employed).7According to the OECD, in 2022 55.7 percent of LAC’s workers were in informal employment, down from 59.4 percent in 2010. There is wide variability across the region’s economies. See Latin American Economic Outlook 2024: Financing Sustainable Development, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, December 9, 2024, 18, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/latin-american-economic-outlook-2024_c437947f-en/full-report.html. In the technology sector, the region features growing digital connectivity, but as is the case with income inequality in LAC, large disparities exist between urban and rural areas and between rich and poor citizens, dampening connectivity rates overall. The major reason is that digital infrastructure lags. Internet networks are often slow, costly, and unreliable, and the region has less than five percent of the world’s data center infrastructure. However, digital transformation markets are growing rapidly, especially in LAC’s biggest tech hubs. The region’s major players in the tech sector generally are also the region’s largest economies: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile.8Of these five, Brazil and Mexico are by far the largest economies. See “GDP (current US$) – Latin America & Caribbean,” World Bank Group, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=ZJ&most_recent_value_desc=true. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Brazil and Argentina have “well above” world average rates of ICT usage, while the remaining five are closer to world averages. See “State of Digital Development and Trends in the Americas: Challenges and Opportunities,” ITU, April 2025, 42, https://www.itu.int/hub/publication/d-ind-sddt_ams-2025/. These countries house LAC’s foremost tech ecosystems, home to the bulk of its start-up activity, advanced tech infrastructure, and talent: São Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Medellin, among others. But smaller economies across the region, including Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica, also feature vibrant tech ecosystems that have become attractive to foreign investors, the result of deliberate policy choices focusing on education, digital infrastructure, stable energy grids, and regulatory reform. As mentioned in sections II and V of this paper, China’s footprint across LAC has grown in nearly every way imaginable since 2000, driven by expanding investment and trade. Although the dollar volume of China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) in the region has tapered in recent years, its interest in investment in tech-related sectors has grown considerably. A 2024 report issued by the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD) indicates that between 2003 and 2022, China invested an estimated $187.5 billion in LAC. Although China’s investment levels began to taper in 2020, IAD data indicates that China began shifting its investment focus in LAC to “new infrastructure,” a category ranging from ICT (including data centers and cloud computing, telecommunications, computing services, satellites, consumer electronics, and more) to advanced manufacturing to electric vehicle manufacturing to renewable energy technologies. In 2022, the last year of data available to IAD, around sixty percent of the value and number of China’s total FDI deals in LAC were in such “new infrastructure” areas.9Margaret Myers, Ángel Melguizo, and Yifang Wang, “‘New Infrastructure’: Emerging Trends in Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Inter-American Dialogue, 2024, 5–9, https://thedialogue.org/analysis/new-infrastructure-emerging-trends-in-chinese-foreign-direct-investment-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean. China’s tech footprint in LAC extends across the entire tech stack, from digital infrastructure through devices to software and governance. Its telecommunications firms including ZTE and Huawei have successfully marketed a range of technologies to address LAC governments’ interests in acquiring low-cost and efficient solutions to various policy problems. While China’s rise has been a direct challenge to US economic primacy in the region, the overall picture for the United States is far from grim. While Chinese FDI has grown substantially since 2000, it has not yet displaced US investment, which remains first on the list of all countries. According to an Atlantic Council report, “no other country has come close to displacing” the United States in LAC greenfield investment over the past quarter century. Moreover, like China’s investments, US investments also have been shifting toward digital infrastructure and services. This investment footprint is led by US tech giants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which have pledged to invest tens of billions of dollars into LAC for expansion of cloud computing, data centers, and AI-related digital infrastructure. These AI “hyperscalers” are attracted by a combination of factors in LAC countries including nearshoring opportunities (as in Mexico) and reliable and low-carbon power sources (as in Brazil), among others. The region’s proximity to the United States continues to be an advantage, partly owing to greater leverage that can be—and has been—employed by the US government in the region. In 2023, for example, Costa Rica excluded Huawei from its 5G network bid (claiming, indirectly, that China is not a “trusted supplier” of ICT equipment) in an act that was seen as the United States successfully influencing then-President Rodrigo Chavez’s government and emblematic of what the US government was attempting to accomplish elsewhere in the world regarding Huawei. The move by the Costa Rican government also helped it to position itself as a reliable partner in the US semiconductor supply chain; Costa Rica has spent years building a reputation as a semiconductor hub through the creation of free trade zones, upskilling of its workforce, and other measures. Ghana’s Minerals Commission personnel remotely monitor and flag suspected illegal mining activities, using surveillance drones and artificial intelligence inside a control room in Accra, Ghana, April 13, 2025. REUTERS/Francis Kokoroko Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa10Like the term “Global South,” the term “sub-Saharan Africa” is a contested one, with critics assailing it as outdated, inappropriate, and imprecise. Nonetheless, as with the Global South term, we use “sub-Saharan Africa” in this paper because it remains the most common descriptor for the region and because SSA states have distinct geographic, economic, geopolitical, and historic differences compared with North African states. Those states are grouped in this paper under the (equally common) regional heading “Middle East and North Africa.” See, e.g., Tomaida Banda and Ronald Kimambo, “Why We’ve Stopped Using the Term ‘Sub-Saharan Africa,’ ” Devex (platform), June 14, 2023, https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-why-we-ve-stopped-using-the-term-sub-saharan-africa-105692. is predominately a low-to-lower-middle-income region (GDP per capita of $1,980 per year), with high income inequality and an enormous informal economy (86.3 percent all workers in SSA are informally employed). The region also is the world’s youngest, with nearly one-third of all young people (under twenty-five years old) in the world today living in Africa, meaning that demographic growth—including ongoing rapid urbanization—will power Africa’s future for decades to come. In the technology sector, the region features increasing digital connectivity, if from a low base (in 2025, only 36 percent of the population were connected online), but with high mobile penetration rates. Despite underinvestment in tech infrastructure, SSA features tech-centric entrepreneurialism and innovation in areas such as fintech (as Kenya’s M-Pesa example illustrates, mobile is a critically important part of the regional economy), e-commerce, and agricultural technology. SSA also is one of the world’s most important regions for technology inputs, including critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium, graphite, rare earth elements, and bauxite among others. Unfortunately, it captures only a small percentage of global revenues from these resources, a reflection of low value-add activities (i.e., processing and refining) within the region. As in other regions, in SSA the major players are its largest economies including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana, which together attract the bulk of the region’s venture capital. These countries’ tech hubs—including Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Accra—thereby possess a disproportionate amount of the region’s entrepreneurial base, talent, and research capabilities. But SSA, like LAC, also features numerous smaller countries, including Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius, and Senegal, that punch well above their weight in tech-centric innovation and tech development. Since 2000, China has become SSA’s leading trading partner and creditor (as referenced in section V). China’s engagement with the region as it relates to digital technology investments extends back to the 1990s, predating the creation of the DSR. Since then, China’s engagement with Africa has deepened considerably to span investments across the full tech stack. It’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms have invested, successfully, in SSA’s technology infrastructure layer (e.g., fiber optic cables and broadband networks) upward to mobile devices (recall the Transsion case from section V) and from there to software and digital services. The results are telling: Chinese tech companies have come to dominate many SSA markets. Huawei, for example, has built roughly half of Africa’s 3G networks and seventy percent of its 4G networks. China’s advantage in SSA, as elsewhere, includes the economic and even political power wielded by its SOEs and otherwise subsidized firms, enabling them to “edge out African companies and other investors, create supply chain dependence on Chinese firms, and reduce the bargaining power of host governments,” in addition to outcompeting US and foreign firms on price. Much of Huawei’s success in building out SSA’s 3G and 4G networks lies in the fact that it’s lower-cost tech appeals to fiscally constrained governments. China’s construction firms also have a reputation for speed, a feature that is attractive to government officials all over the world (not just in SSA) when planning large infrastructure projects. However, as is the case with firms from other countries, China’s companies are not exempt from cost overruns and project delays for a multitude of reasons. Moreover, their speed can come at a price, with projects often criticized as having ignored or bypassed environmental, labor, and other standards-related issues. In contrast, the United States for a long time has exhibited less interest than China in the SSA region, economically and otherwise. The data shows as much: For the past two decades at least, China’s investments into SSA have outweighed those of the US by several multiples, resulting in a significant trade advantage for China. These facts underscore the strategic challenge facing the United States, which is the extent to which it desires to compete successfully with China in the SSA region, and how it can do so given (likely) scarce resources relative to China. Middle East and North Africa The MENA region11Like other regional categories examined in this paper (including the Global South, Asia-Pacific, and sub-Saharan Africa), the MENA region has inexact boundaries. Several countries—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, and Mauritania—are sometimes within or outside of different institutions’ definitions of which countries are in the MENA region. Our definition of it excludes these eight countries. See, e.g., World Population Review, “MENA Countries 2026,” https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mena-countries. is unusual in several respects. There are large interstate divergences in income and resource endowment, with high-income and oil-rich GCC states having multiple times the GDP per capita as MENA averages (Qatar, for example, in 2026 has roughly 4.3 times the GDP per capita as the Middle East average and fourteen times that of the North African average). Perhaps even more consequential is the region’s fractured geopolitics, featuring high levels of interstate and intrastate conflict amid enduring geopolitical and ideological rivalries. External parties, including the major global powers as well as nearby middle powers (e.g., Turkey) are assertive in regional affairs, engaging on a strategic chessboard with the MENA region’s most powerful states, which include the GCC states, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Israel, among others. Most of the MENA region’s leading tech ecosystems are in the GCC, owing to their wealth and political stability. The exception is Israel, which routinely scores higher on innovation ecosystem rankings than all other MENA states. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) 2025 Global Innovation Index, among the world’s most highly respected such indices, ranks Israel the fourteenth most innovative economy in the world. WIPO places the UAE at thirtieth, Saudi Arabia forty-sixth, Qatar forty-eighth, Morocco fifty-seventh, Bahrain sixty-second, Jordan sixth-fifth, Oman sixty-ninth, and Egypt at eighty-sixth. The leading tech hubs in MENA are in those countries: Tel Aviv, Dubai, Riyadh, Doha, Casablanca, Manama, Amman, Muscat, and Cairo. GCC governments, just as they have said regarding the transition to a post-hydrocarbon economy in strategic terms, are investing enormous sums into digital infrastructure such as cloud computing, advanced AI capabilities, and research and development institutions embedded within smart cities. Other MENA states, with fewer resources, cannot invest at the pace of GCC states. Nonetheless, they focus on upgrading digital infrastructure and services, fintech, and software development among other strategic investments. Although China has a longstanding history of engagement in the MENA region, its tech footprint expanded considerably only after the launch of the DSR in 2015, which brought to the region significant investments in digital infrastructure, including subsea data cables. As elsewhere in the Global South, MENA governments have found Chinese tech attractive in terms of ready availability of investment capital, affordability of the technologies on offer by Chinese companies such as Huawei, and general lack of strings tied to investment. In the Gulf, China has attempted to deftly play the subregion’s complicated geopolitics through building economic partnerships (formal and informal) with GCC states while attempting to avoid a confrontation with the United States along geopolitical and even military lines. Its strategy appears to be to utilize partnerships and investment in AI and other technologies to gradually lessen Gulf states’ deep diplomatic, economic, and military ties with the United States. The United States has the opposite strategic question, namely, how to maintain its advantage in the MENA region given China’s rising footprint there. The US position in the region is complicated, to say the least, most recently owing to complexities introduced by the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz problem. The United States must navigate a shifting geoeconomic and geopolitical landscape within MENA through defining and developing new opportunities with strategic partners. However, that complexity also embeds the United States in a web of intersecting interests with MENA states that can and does serve US interests in the tech sector and beyond. In similar fashion to the LAC region, US trade and investments with Gulf states have begun to shift away from energy and toward what the Middle East Institute has argued is becoming a “compute partnership . . . built on shared technical standards, coordinated safeguards, and co-developed infrastructure” in AI and other digital technologies. This shift, according to Karim el-Sayed, an economics analyst, reflects “a deliberate U.S. strategy to rebundle economic influence around digital infrastructure and regulatory alignment, replacing the older crude-for-security bargain with a new digital-for-compliance exchange.” The US government and firms, too, have deftly crafted tech-focused agreements and partnerships with other MENA states, for example Morocco, in AI and military technologies. Asia-Pacific The Asia-Pacific region is vast, geographically, ranging from Afghanistan in the west to small island states in the Pacific. The region contains mostly lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income states, as well as a small number of very wealthy countries that have been a part of the advanced global economy for decades, hence are not defined here as being in the Global South; that list includes Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia, and New Zealand. China itself is a more problematic case, as discussed in section III. The diversity of countries is perhaps greater across this region than any other, owing to the presence of major powers (China and arguably India), emerging middle powers such as Indonesia, very small but tech-savvy and wealthy countries such as Singapore, and low-income countries such as Afghanistan. Leaving aside those Asia-Pacific states listed above as being in the Global North (Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia, and New Zealand), this region’s biggest players in technological development and innovation—China (tenth on WIPO’s 2025 Global Innovation Index) and India (thirty-eighth) — also are major players in the global economy and diplomacy. (Both, as argued in section III of this paper, have more economic and geopolitical power than the Global North states in this region.) Beneath those two are a bevy of smaller but highly tech-savvy economies, including Singapore (fifth on WIPO’s list), Malaysia (thirty-fourth), Vietnam (forty-fourth), Thailand (forty-fifth), the Philippines (fiftieth), and Indonesia (fifty-fifth), underscoring the point about the agency of countries in the Global South. Emerging economies are not just recipients of investment, or just partners in joint initiatives with firms and countries located in the Global North, but drivers of technological change at national, regional, and global scales. In South Asia, India dominates that subregion’s tech landscape, with tech sector revenue estimated at over $300 billion in 2026. India long has excelled in engineering and other technical fields, which when combined with government investments has allowed it to become a development force across a range of technologies including ICT, IT services, AI and machine learning, and semiconductors among others. Much of India’s tech sector is concentrated in its leading tech hubs including Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Elsewhere in South Asia, tech ecosystems in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka are growing quickly but remain far distant in size from India’s. As the WIPO rankings attest, Southeast Asia has the highest concentration of robust tech ecosystems in the Asia-Pacific. In aggregate, the subregion possesses one of the largest economies in the world, including an enormous digital economy. It features high investment levels in the tech sector, including investments focused on AI, cloud computing, e-commerce, and more, and long has been a critical part of the global semiconductor supply chain. Southeast Asia features tech-savvy populations, with high digital and mobile penetration rates, Internet usage rates, e-commerce activity, and social media engagement. Leading tech hubs include Singapore, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and others. Much, though not all, of the Asia-Pacific region can be defined as being in China’s backyard. Conversely, the United States is distant geographically, a situation that reverses the positions of the two powers in LAC. China therefore has longstanding ties (economic, cultural, and diplomatic) with some (by no means all) states, but also antagonistic or at least middling relationships with others, e.g., India and the Philippines. It is unsurprising that China’s trade with countries in the Asia-Pacific is multiples that of the United States, in part owing to a historic pattern of much larger investments in the region—again, a reversal of the situation in LAC. Perhaps more so than other regions within the Global South, China has aggressively pursued tech-focused business relationships with countries in the Asia-Pacific, frequently under the DSR banner. Countries in the region often eagerly embrace investment opportunities arising from China, despite US warnings about overdependence on Chinese technology and despite evidence that China illicitly works through regional intermediaries to acquire technologies that are subject to US export controls (a practice labeled “China washing”). China’s influence on India, the other major regional power, is limited, including in the tech space, but China has invested heavily in India’s rival Pakistan, including in AI. According to one analysis, that investment makes “future diversification away from Chinese platforms [in Pakistan] difficult and expensive.” For the United States, the Asia-Pacific is analogous strategically to MENA in that the US has longstanding security ties across the region as well as significant geoeconomic interests. These interests should be bolstered by the expectation that states that fear PRC geopolitical and economic domination will want to establish ties with the United States, which means that the United States can take advantage of this instinct to hedge between the two powers. In this respect, the United States has been able to build tech-centric partnerships across the region. The United States has a lengthy diplomatic relationship with India (if one that vacillates between cool and warm periods). That relationship includes engagement in technology cooperation across a range of institutional contexts (e.g., tech working groups within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) and technologies including semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, and biopharmaceuticals. Those cooperative efforts that have begun to bear fruit in terms of concrete outcomes (exchanges, research centers, manufacturing plants, etc.). And as in other world regions, US big tech firms long have been active across the Asia-Pacific region seeking investments to take advantage of its enormous digital market. Bogotá is a central arena for growing technology and infrastructure rivalry between the United States and China. UNSPLASH/Random Institute. Assumptions Assumption: A significant increase of US resources is required to outcompete China A central question for US strategists concerns where to invest scarce resources. During the Cold War, different world regions were prioritized over others, with Europe as the primary theater and (arguably) East and Southeast Asia as the secondary theaters. That prioritization scheme made sense given Cold War geography. But on the other hand, at the same time no world region was ignored by US strategists, given that they viewed the competition with the Soviet Union as a truly global one. As the 2023 Atlantic Council strategy paper on global tech competition between China and the US outlines, a US strategy to outcompete China will require that the US invest in its own tech-innovation ecosystem (“running faster” than China) while working in concert with allies and partners in global north/OECD markets. Those elements of a grand strategy should remain unchanged. But as with the Cold War, outcompeting China at global level also will require viewing the entire world as an arena for US engagement. The fact is that China prioritizes economic and diplomatic engagement across the Global South, in contrast to the United States, which has been far more sporadic in how and where it engages, and with what tools. None of this is meant to infer that the United States does not engage at all. Quite the contrary: The US government has numerous initiatives, agreements, and investment vehicles that are targeted at or operative in the Global South. For example, in 2025 it released “America’s AI Action Plan,” a vehicle that aims to “win” the AI tech race with China through dozens of policy initiatives ranging from export vehicles to the coordination of financing and technical assistance across the US government for AI dealmaking purposes including in the Global South. The US government also has numerous investment vehicles that are designed to compete with China in tech-related areas. These include the China and Transformational Exports Program at the Export-Import Bank of the US (EXIM), designed to assist US exporters facing Chinese competition in ten “transformational export areas” (mostly advanced technologies), and the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), which “mobilizes private capital to advance U.S. foreign policy and economic development” abroad and which in 2025 received a 300 percent increase in its investment cap (to $205 billion).12US International Development Finance Corporation, 2025 Annual Report (2025), 2–6, https://www.dfc.gov/our-impact/reports. However, although these vehicles are robust, altogether they are not as comprehensive as the approach that China has taken for decades, one that has paid off for Beijing economically, diplomatically, and geopolitically, as outlined in sections II and V of this paper. Assumption: Most countries in the Global South will prefer to remain non-aligned States in the Global South have divergent interests and will not be persuaded easily about the merits of siding with the United States over China. Many if not most are interested in hedging between the two states in search of “strategic non-alignment,” in part because non-alignment is deeply ingrained across much of the Global South.13On hedging and strategic non-alignment as choices for middle powers around the world, see, e.g., Emerging Middle Powers Report 2025: Momentum for Middle Powers, Körber-Stiftung, April 17, 2025, 31–35, https://koerber-stiftung.de/en/projects/koerber-emerging-middle-powers-initiative/2024-25/. This footing is decades in the making, driven by historical experiences including the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 in the 1950s and 1960s. Global South states also need to attract FDI, acquire the best dual-use and consumer-facing technologies, and find the best opportunities for their own economic development, all of which mitigate against their turning toward the United States or China on a permanent basis. In most instances, US policymakers should expect that the contest across the Global South will be over relative influence and relative gain. Nonetheless, US policymakers should be attuned to shifts in the interests and positioning of countries across the Global South that might make them more amenable to alignment with the United States. While most countries might prefer to be nonaligned, there are opportunities to bring countries closer to the US orbit through the strategy outlined in this paper, as well as through fortuitous developments arising via other countries’ domestic politics and political economies (e.g., in energy or critical minerals). Recommendations Leverage diaspora The US has a distinct advantage over China in that its diasporas are both many in number and well connected with their home countries. Immigrants long have been enormously important to the US tech sector. A 2023 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that about 16 percent of inventors in the United States were immigrants, yet this group was responsible for nearly a quarter of “total innovation output” produced in the United States, for example the number of patents issued and their economic value. Such diasporas should be leveraged to generate business opportunities for the United States in foreign markets. There are many examples of US-based companies that have been founded by immigrants who then go on to expand their businesses in Global South markets. The list is a long one. Cohesity, a data security company based in California, was founded by an Indian-born and US-educated computer scientist that in 2025 opened a regional office in Bangalore “as a cornerstone of its global R&D and customer success strategy” along with announcing plans to invest over one billion dollars in India by 2030. Other successful start-ups are built by foreign nationals who spend years honing their entrepreneurial talents in the United States and then build their companies abroad utilizing their US-based contacts and venture capital. A good example here is Brazil’s Nubank. Founded by David Vélez, a Colombian-born entrepreneur who went to Stanford University and worked in US venture capital and financial services circles before returning to Brazil to found Nubank (with US venture capital). Since 2013, Nubank has become the leading digital financial services platform in Latin America, serving Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. In 2026, it received conditional approval from the US government to begin operations in the United States—underscoring that entrepreneurial and business pathways run in both directions, from US to Global South markets and back again. Diaspora networks should be connected systematically with US government outreach efforts, wherein the government positions itself as a good-faith broker of relationships among and between US and foreign nationals within the tech sector. Andela, a New York-based start-up founded by Nigerians, Canadians, and Americans, is a good example of the synergies that are possible in this space. For over a decade, Andela has focused on training software engineers from emerging economies in Africa and Latin America and then connecting them with labor markets globally, starting with Nigeria and eventually expanding to Africa and then Latin America; by 2022, it represented some 175,000 technologists worldwide. Invest in educational and technical partnerships In the context of tech-centric competition between the United States and China, soft power might be considered an afterthought. Yet soft power, as exercised through educational and technical exchanges and partnerships, forms a key component of China’s attempts to influence events on the ground in the Global South. The PRC has conducted educational exchanges with African institutions dating to the 1950s, a practice that was scaled to the point where, in 2018, nearly 82,000 African students went to China to study. The PRC takes its cultural footprint in Africa and elsewhere seriously, expanding its network of Confucius Institutes (cultural centers in academic institutions around the world, now in forty-nine African countries) in part to buttress its influence with local elites. Similar stories about China’s soft power influence abound elsewhere. Huawei, for example, has signed cooperation agreements with the Technological University of Honduras to train students and professors in digital skills, and has signed a memorandum of understanding with Egypt’s Ministry of Higher Education to partner with three universities to provide free AI training to over 25,000 students. During the Cold War, the US government considered educational exchanges a key plank of its global competition with the Soviet Union. No less a figure than historian and diplomat George Kennan called for “the maximum cultural exchange” with other countries to combat “the negative impressions about [the US] that mark so much of world opinion.”14As quoted in Liping Bu, “Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War,” Journal of American Studies 33, no. 3 (1999): 393, DOI: 10.1017/S0021875899006167. The US government passed supportive legislation (e.g., the Fulbright Act of 1946), built enduring programs through the Marshall Plan and other forms of postwar reconstruction, and worked closely with private institutions such as the Ford Foundation to expand and strengthen educational exchanges through the early decades of the Cold War.15Bu, “Educational Exchange.” Likewise, the upgrading of educational and technical partnerships in today’s global competition with China is necessary if the United States is to contest Chinese soft power on equal terms. As during the Cold War, doing so would yield benefits across three dimensions: strengthening of broad cultural affinities between the nation and populations within Global South countries; shaping the perspectives of elites across government, business, and the media within those same countries; and purely market-based benefits. The United States should take a page from the Cold War playbook and reemphasize engagement with civil society actors. China famously prioritizes working with and through the state and state-approved elites. The United States, by contrast, has a tradition of overseas engagement with civil society actors (partly due to its diaspora; see recommendation A above). In the context of education and technical training, this means the United States should invest in advanced skills development, upskilling, and training for elite groups including policymakers, engineers, media figures, and researchers, as well as demonstration events and training for the broader public. Doing so would cultivate alignment with US interests, values, and systems (public and private), and should positively influence public and private tech procurement decisions. As stated at the outset of this paper, the US government likely will not make the resources available to compete directly with China on a one-to-one dollar basis. But not all is lost. Evidence uncovered by the Atlantic Council indicates that returns from private US investment in LAC are higher compared with China’s, suggesting that it is possible to do more with lower resources in certain overseas contexts. A lesson is that investment dollars can be made to go further than China’s if such investments are made creatively and strategically, for example through creating and then leveraging local educational and training partnerships. Improve situational awareness While reports and news articles can provide data and a conceptual understanding of the technology competition between the United States and China within the Global South, the US government arguably needs to improve its awareness of how the strategies of the two superpowers are playing out in real time on the ground. As the example relating to China’s increasingly visible footprint across public-facing institutions in Africa shows, China has been systematically breaking down the barriers that heretofore might have limited its technological reach and sociopolitical influence in the Global South. Making these trends more visible is imperative. This observation comes at a time when the US government is consolidating its diplomatic footprint around the world, including most recently in Africa, where in May 2026 the administration revealed plans to reduce the number of visa processing embassies and consulates in Africa from about fifty to twenty. And it comes at a time when China has been building its overseas diplomatic capacity to match and even surpass that of the United States: According to the Lowy Institute’s 2024 Global Diplomacy Index, China had slightly more diplomatic posts than the United States, having eliminated a substantial gap over the previous decade. Nonetheless, if the US government is to compete with China on equal terms across the Global South, it will have to upgrade its real-time understanding of what is occurring there. The question will be how to do so without a significant investment of additional resources on the ground and in country (which was a major reason why the US government built its global network of embassies and consulates in the first place). The employment of digital tools, including AI-powered scanning tools, will be an important part of the solution set. Find partners to scale investment State and nonstate entities in the Global South are the most valuable partners to cultivate for purposes of competing with China. These partners are to be buttressed by those with traditional allies in the Global North, i.e., in Europe and East Asia, as well as alliances and institutions such as multilateral development banks including the World Bank, European Investment Bank, and Japan International Cooperation Agency. And as was discussed briefly in section VII, the US government itself is building partnerships through different vehicles. In 2026, the US Trade and Development Agency signed an agreement with a Thai e-commerce platform to pilot generative AI and cloud solutions; in 2025, the EXIM bank approved a $66 million guarantee for a national data center in Côte d’Ivoire; in 2024, DFC announced a more than $250 million financing package for Kenya that included digital connectivity and e-mobility. Yet as this paper has made clear, countries across the Global South frequently hedge between the United States and China, including on tech investment and alignment. Although this situation means that the United States likely will find few permanent takers for an us-or-them alignment, there are numerous opportunities in the Global South that can be opened by deft diplomacy. In this capacity, the US government would be well served to burnish a reputation as a good faith broker in countries and regions across the Global South. Acting as a good faith broker would position the government in the “role of facilitation and arbitration [that suits its] natural strengths. . . . [to give the United States a] ‘behind-the-scene’ role to shape new arrangements which minimise the cost and maximise its reach” in tech-centric diplomacy.16Askari Mahmood, “Shifting Dynamics of Sino-American Competition in Multi-aligned Middle East,” Heliyon 11, no. 1 (2025): 41053, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e41053. Global South states are looking for what Josephine Teo, Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information, has called “technology neutrality” solutions, by which she meant the freedom to choose technologies that most fit their needs, without undue pressure from either China or the United States to choose a particular solution. For both the United States and the PRC, the temptation to pressure countries to choose is high. According to an August 2026 Reuters report, the US State Department is preparing a letter to countries that have joined or might want to join Pax Silica, a US initiative announced in 2025 and focused on building AI supply chains among trusted partners, warning that any country that chooses to join the PRC’s competing effort will be excluded from the US coalition. A facilitation and arbitration footing would lead the US public and private sectors to position themselves as supporters of national ambitions to build their economies through context-specific opportunities. Southeast Asian countries, for example, struggle with providing low-carbon, water-efficient electricity for rapid data center expansion. The United States can provide technologies and expertise to address such deficiencies through, e.g., water-efficient data center technologies. (US hyperscalers such as Google are already doing so in Southeast Asia.) Similar approaches can be utilized in sectors adjacent to tech, such as critical mineral investment in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, SSA, LAC, and elsewhere in the world. Modernize and streamline US government overseas capabilities According to participants in the Atlantic Council workshops, which led to this paper, China’s overseas commercial coordination is more efficient than that of the United States. Its SOEs can access subsidies and credit guarantees to enable swift action abroad, including on large projects (although there are downside risks, including taking on projects considered too risky by foreign companies). Among other things, its SOEs and independent firms (e.g., Huawei) are closely connected to Chinese state banks, such as the Export-Import Bank of China, which give them significant loans with generous lending terms. The US government has no equivalence abroad when it comes to swift financing and other forms of state coordination and support. According to recent Congressional testimony by James Golsen, a former deputy director general of the US and Foreign Commercial Service, US companies (including tech companies) today need “a nimble, cohesive and strategic commercial diplomat corps” to do business successfully abroad. Yet US firms “must navigate a complex set of agencies (nineteen in the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee) . . . [requiring engagement with] different parts of the government who are often not speaking with one another,” yielding slow and indecisive commercial outcomes. The current administration claims that it is reforming the State Department and other agencies along such lines, to emphasize efficiency in identifying and facilitating commercial opportunities for US firms abroad. However, a fundamental rethink of how the entire US government apparatus operates, including but not limited to how the State Department is organized, will require a whole-of-government approach combined with supporting legislative action. Conclusion The opening section of this paper asserted that if the United States is to compete successfully with China, it must improve its engagement with countries across the Global South. It also asserted that it is in the core interest of the United States to so engage, given the benefits that would flow therefrom, including increased trade and exchange with the “global majority” world and the diplomatic and geopolitical gains that would follow. As this strategy has articulated, doing so successfully will depend on the degree to which policymakers and business leaders in the United States apply a range of actions and investments across a nuanced landscape, characterized by significant yet subtle regional and intraregional differences. At the core, however, success in this endeavor will depend greatly on whether the United States can retain its advantage relative to China as a trusted partner in providing tech-based good and services or, where it does not enjoy such a reputation, earn that trust through sustained engagement built on creating positive-sum outcomes for the United States and its partners in the Global South. As this strategy also has made clear, doing so is far from straightforward, requiring clarity of vision, sustained commitment, and agile execution. It will require a deft awareness of on-the-ground shifts in partner countries’ interests. Their desire to hedge between the United States and the PRC provides a diplomatic and business opportunity, giving the US government and its firms the chance to prove that its technologies and tech stack are the better choice over the long run. Atlantic Council Strategy Papers Editorial Board Executive editors Frederick KempeAlexander V. Mirtchev Editor-in-chief Tressa Guenov Editorial board members James L. JonesOdeh AburdenePaula DobrianskyStephen J. HadleyJane Holl LuteGinny MulbergerStephanie MurphyDan PonemanThe Scowcroft Center and Global China Hub are grateful to Frederick Kempe and Alexander V. Mirtchev for their ongoing support of the Atlantic Council Strategy Paper Series in their capacity as executive editors. About the authors The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council and Carnegie Mellon University. Conrad Tucker is currently serving as a science and policy fellow in the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is an internationally recognized researcher and educator whose work has significantly advanced the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to engineering design, manufacturing, and digital health. His research addresses a central challenge in modern engineering systems: reducing manual, time-intensive processes across the design-to-manufacturing pipeline through data-driven, physics-aware computational methods. Peter Engelke is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Global Energy Center, and he is also an executive fellow at the World Economic Forum. At the Atlantic Council, Engelke is the creator of the Council’s most widely read long-form publication series, Global Foresight. His diverse work portfolio spans strategic foresight; geopolitics, diplomacy, and international relations; climate change and Earth systems; food, water, and energy security; emerging and disruptive technologies and tech-based innovation ecosystems; and demographics and urbanization, among other subjects. Acknowledgements The Atlantic Council would like to thank the Tides Foundation for supporting the Council’s work on this publication. The authors would like to thank Samantha Wong, Ginger Matchett, and Charlotte Bertrand for critical support on this project, including research assistance for this strategy paper. The Atlantic Council also would like to thank the Atlantic Council Tech Strategy Consortium members, including Yasmine Abdillah, Mai Hassan, Ari Jacobvits, Craig Singleton, and Santiago Villa, for their support in reviewing this paper and providing valuable feedback. Explore the programs The Global China Hub tracks Beijing’s actions and their global impacts, assessing China’s rise from multiple angles and identifying emerging China policy challenges. The Hub leverages its network of China experts around the world to generate actionable recommendations for policymakers in Washington and beyond. Image: CSU Digital stand at Febraban Tech 2026, organized by the Brazilian Federation of Banks (Febraban), in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on August 24, 2026. The annual event brings together leaders and specialists from the financial, technology, sustainability, telecommunications and retail sectors to discuss innovation and the future of financial services in Brazil. (Photo by Aloisio Mauricio/Fotoarena/Sipa USA)